Sometimes, the Majority of Americans Are Really Stupid

51 percent believe canceling the rest of the stimulus money would create more jobs.

That is insane.

It's one thing to say that canceling the rest of the stimulus money
would help our deficit. That's arguable, even if I think it's dead
wrong, since the best way to help our deficit is to put people back to
work when demand is nonexistent so that they (1) receive taxable income
and (2) spend that taxable income on products to help other people's
taxable income. In our 2009 deficit, $300 billion came from lower tax
receipts, $100 billion came from stimulus tax cuts and about $100 billion
came from stimulus spending. One hundred billion. Blaming the January stimulus for the $1.4
trillion deficit like blaming a pack of Skittles for a cavity.

The idea that canceling the stimulus would create more jobs implies
that passing the stimulus has actually killed more jobs than it's
created, which is bonkers. Let's say you don't want to consider
infrastructure spending or green technology spending or a single job
that might have been created in the private sector. If nothing else,
the tens of billions we've sent to state budgets have, without
question, saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, like teachers, that are
supported by state taxes. It's just a very basic fact.

So this is a crazy statistic, but I think it's important to ask why
Americans think the stimulus is actually hurting job-creation. It's a dumb thing to think, but it must be coming from somewhere. I worry
that it's things like this.

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Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics, labor markets, and the media. He is the author of Hit Makers.